Vijay Kedar has gone from being an investor to the founder of his own health tech startup. His venture has attracted the backing of some of the most respected investors, while raising $100M over the past five years.

On the Dealmakers Podcast, Kedar shared how Healthcare is shifting to the home, how the tech and infrastructure to enable that is changing, and what it is that separates great companies from simply good ones.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Why Travel Makes Great Entrepreneurs

Vijay Kedar was born in Pittsburgh to parents who had emigrated to the US from Chennai, India.

His mother is a computer engineer. His father is a cardiologist, who relocated the family to start his own practice in Pennsylvania after completing his residency in Chicago.

Growing up in an immigrant household, and watching them, taught Vijay and his brother not to take things for granted, and the importance of focus, dedication, and hard work.

From a very early age his parents put an emphasis on education, and intellectual curiosity. A thirst for knowledge that Vijay Kedar says is one of the key foundations of entrepreneurship. A necessity for truly understanding markets and customers.

He found himself very interested in and passionate about medicine. That put him on the path to becoming a clinician himself. Over time, he realized that while he loved that direct interaction, he saw how his father’s impact was limited by the number of hours there were in a day, and the patients they could squeeze into them.

This got him wondering if there were other ways to scale that impact.

Before finding his idea to throw himself into and change the world with, Vijay continued his path of learning and gaining the benefit of new perspectives.

His grandfather, also a clinician, wanted to take his grandchildren to every continent on earth. They traveled to Latin America, Asia, and more. When it came time for college Vijay expanded on this by studying at the University of Ghana in West Africa.

There he was able to study international politics, work with an NGO in the nation’s largest slum, and explore new parts of the country by motorcycle.

He describes the benefits of traveling and expanding your worldview, and ability to understand people and markets more diversity as being extremely powerful for broadening your thinking and problem solving. It brings so much more in the way of mental resources to bring fresh ways of analyzing the status quo and how to solve the problems with it.

From Investor To Operator

After college Kedar went to work in private equity investing with Goldman Sachs.

There he was able to further his learning and broaden his perspectives. It provided a bird’s eye view of multiple industries. Including different business models, and which were more resilient to changes. As well as benefiting from working with different management teams, and seeing how they turned strategy into execution, tackled new opportunities, and more. He got to see how investors looked at companies and analyzed them.

However, this all only kindled his desire to get closer to operations.

During his time at Goldman Sachs, Obamacare was going into effect. Vijay dove into reading the entire legislation. He wanted to see how it would impact the healthcare space, and what opportunities it would create.

He saw a breathtaking amount of change coming, all throughout the subsectors of healthcare. Each chapter of the law opened up innovative opportunities.

This drove Vijay to gain an even deeper understanding of the companies and founders in the space trying to drive the next round of change. So, he dove into talking to investment bankers, networking with founders, and cold-emailing people in the industry.

The Stint With Oscar Health

He was struck with the idea, vision, and consumer focus of the cofounders of Oscar Health, and joined as one of the first few dozen team members.

There he learned a lot more about what it really took to drive change in the healthcare ecosystem. How all the players interacted with each other.

However, when his mother was diagnosed with stage three cancer, he really woke up to just how broken the healthcare system was. Although she is in remission now, there were months of ending up being readmitted to hospitals, going through the ICU, and battling and waiting for critical supplies for at-home care. He truly experienced how flawed the system was on a whole new level.

In tandem with this, he saw the shift towards more home healthcare coming.

Tomorrow Health

Vijay left Oscar and spent the next year in market research. He spoke to thousands of patients and their families. He spoke to dozens of hospital discharge managers, insurers, regulators, and distributors of healthcare supplies.

He discovered the system just wasn’t working for anyone.

He vowed to do something about it, started building a team, and launched Tomorrow Health. A technology-driven platform for providing the infrastructure for more effective and more efficient home-based healthcare.

Over the past five years, they’ve already raised close to $100M through a Series B round, as they’ve kept expanding their services across the country.

Storytelling is everything which is something that Vijay Kedar was able to master. Being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides is the key. For a winning deck, take a look at the Pitch Deck Template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:

• Fundraising by each round
• How healthcare is changing
• The difference between good and great companies
• Vijay’s top advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs

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